20 ene. 2009

They are doing something great over at WKCR in NYC, which you can get streaming over the net: a Roy Haynes festival of about 5 gadzillion hours. Unfortunately I only noticed this morning, so I'll only hear that last few days of it--during waking hours. From the 1940s to the current decade, that's parts of SEVEN decades of music making. And I say parts of because there's nothing from earliest part of the 40s, and the current decade is not yet completed. Even rounding down to sixty years, it's an impressive span of time to be at the top of your game, where Roy still is. Even if Roy is not your number one guy on the drum throne, there's plenty of good music even without focusing on the drummer per se: such as, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker...

I'm a big fan of excess like this. A couple hundred hours in a row playing the entire discography of Roy Haynes? Fine by me. It makes me feel almost normal (as the guy reading 9,000 books of poetry). It's easy to be in a good mood after getting rid of Presidente Arbusto after 8 years of shameful abjection. Obama... and Roy Haynes too!

Even if RH is not your main guy, you can't really see him as markedly inferior to any other player in any context. If he sat in for Elvin in Coltrane's quartet, as he did, the results are still going to be great--or if he sat in for Max Roach with a Parker quintet--the same thing holds. He's just about the best drummer for Chick Corea or Pat Matheny too.

Páginas

Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."